The Rest of the Story
by dragonflybeach
Summary: Chuck is still writing the Supernatural books, and he thinks his editor cut way too much out of the latest one, so he takes matters into his own hands. Coda to s08e19 Taxi Driver, because who really believes Sam had no more trouble than that in Hell?


"You massacred my book, Phil!"

"Hello, Chuck." replied the editor. "How are you today? How kind of you to call me on my day off."

"I mean it, Phil." the author fumed. "You cut way, way too much out of this one."

"All I did was some simple, professional editing." Phil protested.

"Editing my ass!" Chuck shouted. "The Vikings left more when they pillaged Northumberland! You annihilated it!"

"Chuck, calm down." Phil ordered. "Be reasonable about this. We had to cut some extraneous content. The manuscript you submitted was over 700 pages! You're not J. K. Rowling, Chuck. No one was going to read a book that long."

"Are you out of your mind?" Chuck argued. "Carver Edlund fans like to read. They write fanfictions based on the characters that are longer than 700 pages!"

"Seven hundred pages of the brothers fucking each other?" Phil scoffed. "Seriously?"

"Oh, it gets worse." Chuck sighed. "They've gotten Castiel and Gabriel in the mix now, and apparently the hottest new couple is Bobby and Crowley."

"Don't tell me this shit!" Phil groaned. "Now I need to go bleach my eyeballs."

"Just ... just ... you cut too much out." Chuck answered, more calmly this time.

"Chuck, I know how dedicated you are to this series." Phil conceded. "But since we have a corporate publisher now, not Sara who ran the small potatoes operation, we have to do things their way. And they said no 700 page books."

"But you changed the whole story!" Chuck insisted.

"No, I cut a lot of details, but still, Sam goes to Hell, gets Bobby out, Crowley tries to stop them from getting back, Dean and Benny save them, and everyone comes out no worse for wear." Phil listed off. "It's the same story, just condensed down from spending 300 pages of Sam wandering around Hell."

"That's the whole point!" Chuck argued. "He went to Hell! With a capital H! He didn't go to a haunted house at the county fair! None of the fans are going to believe that he just waltzed in with no trouble, found Bobby in the third cell he looked in, and only had to fight a couple token demons to get out! He spent hours looking for Bobby! He ran intoRuby! He saw Bela being tortured! All ... "

"And that particular scene," Phil blew out a long breath into the phone. "That was particularly graphic and brutal, even for you."

"She's in Hell, Phil! You think she's sitting around sipping champagne and getting her nails done?" Chuck raged. "All of those things were important! That demon that asked Sam if he was saving the right innocent soul, that reminded him that Adam was still in the cage. The one that taunted him with taking him back to Lucifer. Those were all important,Phil!" Chuck was back to shouting.

"Chuck ... " Phil tried to soothe, but was interrupted again.

"What about the discussion with Bobby of leaving the gate to Hell open?" Chuck continued. "That's going to be significant later!"

"I'm sure it will." Phil tried to pacify the author. "But this way, only a few bright readers will think of the gate being left open as foreshadowing, and the rest will think you're a genius when it comes back to matter later on."

"But it's important for them to read it and understand all of it now!" Chuck pressed on. "They need to know that demons can't pass through that portal, so they don't have this big plot hole of why Crowley couldn't just access Purgatory through the back door! They need to see exactly what this trial did to Sam, what it did to him to go back to Hell. What it did to both brothers. You've got Sam asking Ajay if this was Hell! He knew it wasn't Hell. He told Ajay 'This isn't the Hell where I was.' The fans need to know what ... "

"What really happened?" Phil finished. "Is that what you were going to say? Honestly, Chuck, you act like you're writing about real people sometimes. I get that, these characters are important to you. But if you want to keep writing about them and getting paid for it, no 700 page books."

Chuck sighed but didn't answer.

"Now, I was about to take the wife and kids to a movie." Phil said. "Go have a drink and calm down, and maybe take a vacation before you start on the next book. Really, no matter how dedicated you are to these characters, I think a break would do you a lot of good."

"Yeah, I'll think about it." Chuck grumbled before hanging up the phone.

"They've got to know." he muttered, as he sat down at his computer and logged in to his favorite fanfiction site.


End file.
